National Association for the Advancement of Colored People

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People appears in the account as one of the few organized voices seeking to prevent the execution of George Stinney, a fourteen-year-old Black boy convicted in a trial marked by racial exclusion and extraordinary speed. Its appeal, made alongside Black clergy, asked the governor to commute Stinney’s death sentence to life imprisonment. The governor refused, and Stinney was executed in the electric chair.

Intervention in the Stinney Case

After an all-white jury convicted Stinney of rape and murder, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People joined Black clergy in asking that his sentence be changed from death to life imprisonment. The request offered a last opportunity for executive intervention after a trial that lasted only a few hours and ended with a death sentence. The account does not describe the organization’s internal deliberations or the mechanics of its appeal; it records its intervention at the point when the sentence might still have been altered.

The Racially Excluded Trial

The appeal followed proceedings from which African Americans had been excluded. An estimated fifteen hundred white people crowded the courtroom and gathered outside the building, while no African Americans were allowed inside. Stinney’s court-appointed lawyer called no witnesses, and the prosecution relied only on the sheriff’s account of Stinney’s alleged confession. An all-white jury deliberated for ten minutes before convicting him. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s request for commutation came against this background: the conviction and sentence had been produced by a process in which Black participation and meaningful defense were absent.

Refusal and Execution

The governor declined to intervene despite the appeal by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and Black clergy. Stinney was sent to Columbia, South Carolina, for execution. At five feet two inches tall and ninety-two pounds, he was so small that prison staff placed a Bible beneath him when the chair’s electrodes would not fit his frame. He entered the execution room alone, without family or people of color present. The appeal had not changed the outcome: eighty-one days after two young girls first approached him to ask where they might find flowers, Stinney was pronounced dead.

Significance and Aftermath

The organization’s role in the account is specific but consequential: it joined a public appeal to spare a child’s life, but its intervention could not overcome the state’s decision to execute him. The narrative presents the execution as an instance of the racial politics of the South, while also describing how practices once directed chiefly at controlling and punishing Black people later spread through the broader criminal justice system. Years afterward, rumors surfaced that a white man from a prominent family had confessed on his deathbed to killing the girls, and an effort to exonerate Stinney was launched. The account does not assign either later development to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; its documented action remains the unsuccessful commutation appeal.